The Chinese Telephone Exchange

The telephone was invented back in 1876, and just a few years after, in the 1880s, the first Chinese Telephone Exchange was established right here across the street. But the original building was completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1906 along with all the rest of Chinatown. But in 1909, they built this very Chinese-looking building to replace it. The Chinese Telephone Exchange was originally a sealed system so you could only call other people within Chinatown. If you went inside here, you'd see quite a manual system. There were human operators using physical switchboards so they would manually put you through to the person you wanted to call. And because the Chinese found it very rude to call the person by number, those operators had to memorize the names and numbers of everybody in Chinatown.